Three Otherwordly Writing Prompts from Kirsty Logan

This week’s prompt is from Kirsty Logan, a writer based in Scotland whose debut novel is The Gracekeepers (Penguin), a lyrical story of a world covered in water.

Choose something you think you cannot live without: food, oxygen, light; or your child, the internet, your hands. Now write about a world where everyone has adapted to live without that thing.

Choose a strong emotion you have felt recently: grief, heartbreak, joy, confusion, despair, shame, love. Now write five ways that emotion could manifest itself in the real world (perhaps a heart that could be rented and returned for each new lover; a compulsion to eat lightbulbs when the world feels dark; living, breathing sorrows that must be drowned in the bath). Now choose your favourite and write about it.

Choose a set of binaries such as man/woman, land/sea, security/freedom, or wildness/domesticity. Now write about a character trying to exist between the two.